Toby Harris

‘Ambient Technology for Museums’ was a nine-month ‘investigation into applying the benefits of many modern technologies to enhance the museum goers’ experience’.

It was the main project of my Masters of Arts in Product Design, taken 1999-2000, and was awarded a distinction. The main themes were harnessing informatics and humanising technology. Research encompassed cultural issues as much as technology and resulted in an innovative museum guide system.

The project was inspired by my Mechanical Engineering ergonomics project ‘Augmented Reality Through Projected Displays’, in which me and my inspired tutor - somehow , quite incongruously - managed to create an ‘Augmented Art Gallery’ as the main research piece. From that, we’d seen a lot of promise in furthering understanding and interpretation in the very information-rich and controlled spaces of museums through using technology, and so wanted to find a way of investigating it further. What was particularly good about the Masters as a vehicle for this, was the approach being pioneered there by Jack Ingram called ‘designing the user experience’, which really facilitated an objective look at just what technology should be doing, rather than surveying what was cool in technology at the time. Along with massive inspiration from Antony Dunne‘s ’Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design’, the project proved a really progressive investigation of just what product design was in a world that was increasingly mediated through electronic objects whose form was invariably less important than their behaviour. So rather than a product, it became a system of products. Rather than a fashioned item, displayed in a fishtank, there were placeholder suggestions independent from their behaviour, and videos of these rough props showing the context of use. But most of all, I went in imagining a multi-media orgy of an exhibit, and came out enlightened with an approach to problems that in this case led to a parrot on your shoulder, narrating your experience.

Project website archived at: http://maproject.tobyz.net, in particular check the walkthrough animation (historical note: i learnt flash doing this, trying to make a static diagram explain what i wanted turned into an animation and a love of flash that lasted many years). PDFs of the project reports, a more media-heavy version of the interactive, and various full-res images and photos from the exhibition can be downloaded from the attached zip.

all that apart, the project behind that bookcase video has developed optical camoflage, ‘ghost in the shell’ on our streets. although it only works if you wear their helmet, so not too useful as camoflage but in terms of augmented reality and infomatics, amazing.http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDIA/xv/

i just posted up the piece on the museum robot, and have sat here since thinking it doesn’t even touch on why this stuff is so cool, and also why the hell did they choose a robot? and a red cylinder at that? i don’t think i can get much further without railing against their implementation, but then they’re not product designers, eh, and they certainly didn’t go through the magic process with jack ingram and the others. to paraphrase our outcome, you want to allow each visitor to have a parrot on their shoulder that interprets the museum for the visitor as they journey through it, and add to that a magic magnifying glass so they can layer the audio description into the physical space - it really leverage the power of an audio description. you’d think you want to put all-singing, all-dancing multimedia extravaganzas around every exhibit, but that proved not the way by a long shot. in that, the researchers got it right by having a guide that goes round with the visitors, and that uses speech to communicate the interest.
so whats cool about the robot, is that it contains the realisation of the italian’s research into gelling hyperspace and the physical world into an appropriate, human narration. it has an understanding of what you’re looking at, it has a growing understanding of you, and it can put two and two together to not only describe what you’re seeing, but describe it in terms of what you’ve seen, and give you some options as to where to go next based on all that. its amazing what you can infer, say you dwell on painter x, but pass by painter y - such a system can then cross reference the two find some trends, and use that to guide its future interpretation of the museum exhibits. and its always following you and your impulses, not imposing a predefined experience.
in short, its all about cutting it down to an intelligent narration, and then giving that narration a tool so it can interact with the physical space, a spotlight in effect. and who would have thought that in our increasingly media bombarded environment.

i also realised the website of my project had gone off-line for a while, so i’ve put it back. if you’ve got this far, you should check it out. there’s an animation following a visitor to the museum, thats a good place to start - green box / ‘system’

my antidote to the hectic environment i work in is to find a calm space and quietly read the paper at lunchtime. its funny the things you pick up as you pick through the stories, but today a small story about an “oversized vacuum cleaner” totally threw me. i’m so happy, as from what i can infer the researchers who developed the key enabling technology for a design project of mine have made it out of the laboratory and into the real world.
its hard to explain just how much this moves me. it wasn’t just any project, the nine-months i spent in 2000 on my master-of-arts project was the most rewarding experience of my ‘working’ life. i was devoted to a first principles reworking of how technology can enhance the experience of visiting a museum - i had essentially taken a masters course in product design just to be able to continue my earlier work where i’d glimpsed the potential. it was stimulating, i was making a difference, it felt worthwhile - we invented a whole new paradigm for human-computer-interaction, your granny could use it, and museums fulfilled their promise to be the ideal environment to incubate these technologies in. unfortunately, though perhaps not particularly surprisingly, the real world tends not to have too much room for the blue sky working of that kind of academic space, no-matter how grounded in deployable reality, and so i’ve always felt slightly forlorn that the ideas and innovations developed in that time have sat on the shelf.
well, today, somebody got there, made it happen. i’m happy for them, for the ideas, and for the people their work is going to help. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1736315,00.html